The Best American Poetry

The Alta California Chapbook Prize from Gunpowder Press is open! [by Emma Trelles]

 Gunpowder Press invites emerging and established Latina/x/o/e poets (age 18+) residing in California to enter the 2nd Alta California Chapbook Prize. The deadline is October 3, 2022.

Two manuscripts will be selected and published in bilingual editions. Send 8-12 pages of poetry written in either English or Spanish.The judge is Francisco Aragón and the series editor is Emma Trelles.  

Click here for complete details about the contest and to submit your work!


This year's prize is made possible by the Academy of American Poets with funds from the Mellon Foundation.

Announcing the Gunpowder Press Latinx Poetry Chapbook contest [by Emma Trelles]

Gunpowder Press invites Latinx poets who are current residents of California  (age 18+)  to submit to the first Gunpowder Latinx Poetry Chapbook contest. The deadline to submit is September 30, 2021.

Poems may be submitted in English or Spanish. Selected manuscripts will be published in both English and Spanish.

We especially encourage poets living on the Central Coast in Santa Barbara, Ventura, or San Luis Obispo counties to submit. Special attention will be given to poets who have not yet published a full-length collection.

Two manuscripts will be selected for publication in bilingual editions. The winning poets will each receive $250.00, 10 copies of the published chapbook, and an invitation to read at the Mission Poetry Series in Santa Barbara in 2022. 

For all of the guidelines, in English and in Spanish, visit https://gunpowderpress.submittable.com/submit

Gunpowder Press invita a los poetas Latinx que residen en California (mayores de 18 años de edad) a participar en el primer concurso del Gunpowder Latinx Plaquette de Poesía.

Los poemas pueden estar escritos en inglés o español. Los manuscritos seleccionados se publicarán en formato bilingüe: en inglés y en español.

Invitamos especialmente a los poetas que viven en la costa central y en los condados de Santa Bárbara, Ventura, o San Luis Obispo. Se prestará atención especial a los poetas que aún no hayan publicado una colección completa.

Se seleccionarán dos manuscritos para publicación en ediciones bilingües. Los poetas ganadores recibirán $ 250.00 cada uno, 10 copias del poemario publicado, y una invitación para leer en la Mission Poetry Series en Santa Bárbara en 2022. Para más detalles, visita https://gunpowderpress.submittable.com/submit

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs: John Murillo

Variations on a Theme by Elizabeth Bishop

by John Murillo

Start with loss.  Lose everything.  Then lose it all again. 
Lose a good woman on a bad day.  Find a better woman,
then lose five friends chasing her.  Learn to lose as if
your life depended on it.  Learn that your life depends on it.
Learn it like karate, like riding a bike.  Learn it, master it.
Lose money, lose time, lose your natural mind.
Get left behind, then learn to leave others.  Lose and
lose again.  Measure a father’s coffin against a cousin’s
crashing T-cells.  Kiss your sister through prison glass. 
Know why your woman’s not answering her phone.
Lose sleep.  Lose religion.  Lose your wallet in El Segundo. 
Open your window.  Listen: the last slow notes
of a Donny Hathaway song.  A child crying.  Listen: 
A drunk man is cussing out the moon.  He sounds like
your dead uncle, who, before he left, lost a leg
to sugar.  Shame.  Learn what’s given can be taken;
what can be taken, will.  This you can bet on without
losing.  Sure as nightfall and an empty bed.  Lose
and lose again.  Lose until it’s second nature.  Losing
farther, losing faster.  Lean out your open window, listen:
The child is laughing now. No, it’s the drunk man again
in the street, losing his voice, suffering each invisible star.

 

John Murillo is the author of the poetry collections, Up Jump the Boogie (Cypher 2010, Four Way 2020), finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Pen Open Book Award, and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way Books 2020). His honors include a Pushcart Prize, the J Howard and Barbara MJ Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Cave Canem Foundation, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and Best American Poetry 2017, 2019, and 2020.  He is an assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University and also teaches in the low residency MFA program at Sierra Nevada College.

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs is a curated collaboration between Francisco Aragón at Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies, and Emma Trelles at the Best American Poetry blog.

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs: Yesenia Montilla

Eartha Kitt As Muse

by Yesenia Montilla

The eyes are two saucers filled with every

forlorn woman’s last meal: roasted

chicken & a good Bordeaux                    & how

the heart is found in the neck’s thick artery, ready

                                    for a man’s good touch.

Eartha, I know nothing about fame or fortune

            but I know a little about being so lonely

that even the flower’s elaborate bloom can not keep me company.

You’re so damn pretty, that I could write a poem about you

                        & you  

                        & (insert lover’s name)    We both have had plenty

to spare           & darling, I love how

we look in the mirror & kiss the air

            & how when our hand waves in greeting

the sky and all its particles dance & a sweet sigh

escapes from our parted lips                   

                        & isn’t that  sound a kind of tenderness?

How laughter bolts from our mouths like a wild

heart drumming

this is how we muzzle the world —

 

Yesenia Montilla is an Afro-Latina poet & a daughter of immigrants. She received her MFA from Drew University in Poetry & Poetry in translation. Her first collection The Pink Box was published by Willow Books & was longlisted for a PEN award. She lives in Harlem, NY.

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs is a curated collaboration between Francisco Aragón at Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies, and Emma Trelles at the Best American Poetry blog.

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs: Maryam Ivette Parhizkar

A memory of freedom forgotten

by Maryam Ivette Parhizkar
 

It comes seeking the legitimacy of history but
even that feels like a violence—that is: history
is narrative. The need to break the plot
of itself. The field, something like a field
is a plot. A plot is a demarcation. I was running
some place like a field & there she was, her hand
at her waist. We were before language, language
was & was not history, she did not hold the memory
of beating before or after, body at ease, arms not
akimbo but almost in a holding. We were all there,
golden, maybe insects in the grass. You were running
into open space, even the sky was different than
what I remembered. Language already happened but
we were before language. Our smells did not matter
except they told each other who was there. (Scarcity—
who invented  that name.) Enclosure before history
of enclosure.

                                                            For Phoebe Glick and Sara Jane Stoner 
                                                            after language from Ruth Wilson Gilmore

 

Maryam Ivette Parhizkar was born and raised by a Salvadoran and Iranian family in southwest Houston, Texas. Her chapbooks include Somewhere Else the Sun is Falling into Someone's Eyes (Belladonna*, 2019), As for the future (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2016), and Pull: a ballad (The Operating System, 2014). She is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies and African American Studies at Yale University and a CantoMundo fellow. She lives in Jersey City, on the periphery of the Hackensack Meadowlands. 

 

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs is a curated collaboration between Francisco Aragón at Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies, and Emma Trelles at the Best American Poetry blog.

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs: Edwin Torres

Subordinate Volca  (after the eighth elegy)

by Edwin Torres                                                        

I dreamt I was holding a sea creature, tightly, in bed, the room was not mine, but a long darkened space with no walls, almost a bottom of the ocean with no water, it was mid-dawn or dead at night, we were under covers, in the dream, yet exposed, in the dream, engaged in what might be considered aggressive cuddling, up there, on the surface, social distance was law, humanity had ascended to avoidance for survival, in the dream, violence was carried out without leaving home, using language, crimes were committed in every sentence, isolation, no longer a mandate, but a guided meditation, under the rendered open, I was released in slippage, as the shadow keeping me warm, kept floating, and settling, back, on whatever it was I had become, the creature in my arms, was cocooned in translucent answers, hints of the binary defined our encounter, my masculine had nothing to do with our need, as if I were holding a giant bean bag, protected in a clear sack, we were viral tentacles, un-limbed by reciprocal touchlings, hovering over each other, the head was a protrusion where the neck should be, encased in hermetics, agoraphobic aurora, effable sock mask, secured by assyrian tendrils buckled on each side, with features pulled back, the face was a cross, between a pucker and the luminescent temporal within, conundrum of the sentient, what counted for something, remained there, a clear latex funnel appeared where the mouth should be, bright red lips at the base, in my barely contained appendages, with no trace of longing, I was holding this unformed plastic sack of flesh, while listening closely to words, spilling slowly, from the inverted triangular mouth funnel, I would in turn, open my mouth over the funnel, guiding droplets of silver to engorge themselves around the cochlea, organ finding organ, we were patient, catching what bits of frenetic arousal would conjure themselves, into each other's available orifi, we remained like this for years, in the dream, swaying to non-existent water, spilling the secret of poems, without fear of hierarchy, or promise.

 

Edwin Torres is the author of 10 poetry collections, including XoeteoX: the infinite word object (Wave Books), Ameriscopia (University of Arizona Press), The PoPedology of an Ambient Language (Atelos Books), and is editor of the inter-genre anthology, The Body In Language: An Anthology (Counterpath Press 2019). He has performed his multi-disciplinary bodylingo poetics worldwide. Fellowships include NYFA, The Foundation for Contemporary Art, and The DIA Arts Foundation. Anthologies include Fractured Ecologies, Who Will Speak For America, American Poets In The 21st Century: Poetics Of Social Engagement, Postmodern American Poetry Vol. 2, Kindergarde: Avant Garde Poems For Children, and Aloud: Voices From The Nuyorican Poets Café.

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs is a curated collaboration between Francisco Aragón at Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies, and Emma Trelles at the Best American Poetry blog.

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs: Sheila Maldonado

♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

copy rong, a video poem by Sheila Maldonado

♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

Sheila Maldonado is the author of the poetry collections one-bedroom solo (A Gathering of the Tribes / Fly by Night Press, 2011) and that's what you get (Brooklyn Arts Press, forthcoming, 2020). She is a CantoMundo Fellow and a Creative Capital awardee as part of desveladas, a visual writing collective. She has served as an artist-in-residence on Governors Island, New York, for the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and a Cultural Envoy to Honduras for the U.S. State Department. She teaches English for The City University of New York. She was born in Brooklyn, raised in Coney Island, the daughter of Armando and Vilma of El Progreso, Yoro, Honduras. She lives in El Alto Manhattan. This video poem first appeared in House Party #14, a digital publication and performance series of The Poetry Project.

 

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs is a curated collaboration between Francisco Aragón at Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies, and Emma Trelles at the Best American Poetry blog.

 

 

 

 

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs: Joshua Escobar

 

Trade?-markers, pen, paper-2017-Joshua Escobar

everybody in general
by Joshua Escobar

let’s kiss
Frank as in Frankenstein

let’s kiss
people in cages

let’s kiss
nebulae double-crossed

let's kiss
straight people mauling whatever they love

let's kiss
the sexuality of other cities

let’s kiss
unused doctrines & volumes of knowledge

let’s kiss
lovers playing up the doom

let’s kiss
feathers vs. chasm

let’s kiss
chasm vs. feathers

let’s kiss
Saint Francisco of the Latin Exes

let’s kiss
agony to death

let’s kiss
R.A.'s BOMBNESS

let’s kiss
a baby queer's hoe streak

let’s kiss
another sexy guy’s disinterest

let’s kiss
the fruity aftertaste of Lucifer’s skull & bones soup

let’s kiss
youth drilled anew

even as it’s impossible to see each other
let’s kiss

 

 

Joshua Escobar is the author of the chapbooks Caljforkya Voltage and xxox fm, as well as the new full-length collection about being a deejay in a queer dystopia,  Bareback Nightfall (Noemi Press, 2020). He holds a Master's from UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, as well as from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. He is a regional chair (California) for CantoMundo, and the co-founder of the all-ages zine, Orange Mercury. He teaches at Santa Barbara City College, and reviews poetry collections in his free time.
IG: djashtrae17. "everybody in general" was previously published in the Brooklyn Rail.

 

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs is a curated collaboration between Francisco Aragón at Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies, and Emma Trelles at the Best American Poetry blog.

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs: Raina J. León

Art by Raffaele Monchiero León, age 23 months

suspect

by Raina J. León

in the isolation room, there are dirt spots on the floor.  in laboring, as the contraction waves rise to peak pain and then taper, i focus on dirt.  i am riding a wave above the soiling.  the child washes me over in hot spray.  my body sheens over in glow.  a nurse says, you are so strong and you are doing so well.  her affirmations are dumb; i do not trust them.  how can i when i cannot see her lips, her face, beneath the blue mask.  i, too, am masked.  it’s a dirty exchange.  i think in expletives.  i try to return to the wave.  i ask for a heating pad.  they will never bring it.  my touch is contagion, suspected contagion.  i am guilty until proven innocent.  a fever is pandemic. a black body is pandemic.  a fever is not a possible sign of labor, though i am laboring.  the child pushes blood through the gate, announces herself.  the body takes over.  the doctor says, “do whatever your body tells you.” as if i could stop her entrance on this human water, the fertile spark of me a path into an isolation filled with people.  i focus on the spots and their erasure.  mine.

 

photo credit: Matteo Monchiero

Raina J. León, PhD, is a Black, Afro-Boricua, native Philadelphian, poet, writer, and teacher educator. She is a fellow of Cave Canem graduate fellow (2006), the Carolina African American Writers Collective, Macondo, and CantoMundo and has been published in over 100 publications in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and academic scholarship. She believes in collective action and community work, the profound power of holding space for the telling of our stories, and the practice of humanizing education.

She is the author of three collections of poetry, Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn and sombra: dis(locate) and the chapbooks, profeta without refuge and Areyto to Atabey: Essays on the Mother(ing) Self. She is a member of the SF Writers Grotto and The Ruby in San Francisco. She also is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, a journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts. She is a full professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California, only the third Black person (all Black women) and the first Afro-Latina to achieve that rank there.

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs is a curated collaboration between Francisco Aragón at Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies, and Emma Trelles at the Best American Poetry blog.

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs: Roberto Carlos Garcia

Down these mean streets, 2017, Roberto Carlos Garcia

 from Mixtape for City Kids from Dysfunctional but Happy Families, Kids Like Me
                                        (a new form )
by Roberto Carlos Garcia 

When the light from that moon spilled
out of your mother’s belly, I tell you,
you were smiling then. We need a name:
but we can’t call this Menace to the Hood
or Boys in Society or no shit like that. You
have been born into a world. Look around.
See that black boy over there running scared,
his old man got a problem & it’s a bad one. Mami?
Even though she don’t have a job, Mami still
works hard. The last 23 years of her life have been
spent teaching a poet & killing generations
of cockroaches with sky-blue plastic slippers.
But these are the people who will love you
with the same love they received, or hopefully
better.  You will have enemies too. My enemies
ride jets to parties. They use words like casualties
to speak of murder. Yes, you’ll survive. Look at me.
I’m shocked too, I’m supposed to be locked up too,
you escape what I escaped you’d be in Paris
getting fucked up too. My father said…surviving
one thing means another comes & kills you.
He’s dead, & so, I trust him. I know this isn’t much.
But I wanted to explain this life to you, even if
I had to become, over the years, someone else to do it.
The miracle of Jesus is himself, not what he said or did
about the future. Forget the future. I’d worship someone
who could do that. Then, slowly, Lo is fo e ri bari
Lo is fo e ri bari  love is for everybody Love is for
every every body love  love love everybody love.


Poet, storyteller, and essayist Roberto Carlos Garcia is a self-described “sancocho […] of provisions from the Harlem Renaissance, the Spanish Poets of 1929, the Black Arts Movement, the Nuyorican School, and the Modernists.” A native New Yorker, Garcia is rigorously interrogative of himself and the world around him, conveying “nakedness of emotion, intent, and experience,” and he writes extensively about the Afro-Latinx and Afro-diasporic experience. Roberto’s third poetry collection, [Elegies], is forthcoming from FlowerSong Press. His second poetry collection, black / Maybe: An Afro Lyric, is available from Willow Books.  Roberto’s first collection, Melancolía, is available from Červená Barva Press. His poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY Magazine, The BreakBeat Poets Vol 4: LatiNEXT, Bettering American Poetry Vol. 3, The Root, Those People, Rigorous, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Gawker, Barrelhouse, The Acentos Review, Lunch Ticket, and many others. He is founder of the cooperative press Get Fresh Books Publishing, A NonProfit Corp. Roberto holds an MFA in Poetry and Poetry in Translation and is the creator of the “mixtape” poem, which resembles a cento in that it is composed of lines borrowed from other poets but also includes lines from fiction, non-fiction, rap lyrics, and other forms of literature. A “mixtape” is between 50 to 100 lines long and should have at least ten original lines written by the poet. The above poem excerpt borrows lines from Reginald Dwaye Betts, Gil Scott Heron, Willie Perdomo, Aracelis Girmay, Jay-Z, John Murillo, Larry Levis, and Rumi.

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs is a curated collaboration between Francisco Aragón at Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies, and Emma Trelles at the Best American Poetry blog.

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs: Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes

we the dancing millions
by Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes

(after Omar Sakr’s Where I am Not)

I ask the driver if he likes New York.

            we have not yet established I speak his mother

tongue. he laments against loneliness, a season

            here depressed, a season back on the island, in revelry. a season

here. a season there. season season season season

            he finds with every return that people here do not speak

with each other, the rushingrushing an anvil on relation.

            so many unspokens. better to be with family, to go where

you are loved. I try to love him for the length of the ride,

            brown bodies we are in the loneliest world      so

I smile, a secret gesture of union. he says through the rearview,

            it is a beautiful day isn’t it? I look out the window, he taps

the steering wheel of his car, the hum of diaspora a child we’ve made

            between us, ready to live the twelve minutes to my destination. hermosa,

pero, hermosa. his whole face beams the sun, the winter in him dies—

            ¿hablas español?! we feast on language

the New York kind of lonesome we know

            our bridge & tunnel lovechild nobody wants

to love. but we learn to love her too. when he isn’t driving

            all of Brooklyn through their silence, he—José—(with the name

of my grandfather) dances home to his country of brothers,

            their stifled exuberance riving imperialism’s calendar. an abundance

of rice unworried for time: there is no word for late in the island’s mouth.

            what a world                where you can linger into the hours of dusk,

live off the horizon by touching its mornings. I wonder

            what it would take to be the bambuco itself, the waltz

of lovers never-quite-touching in want. even my dreams

            of music play the asymptote of solitudes. I am not sure who to blame,

though it is capitalism & poetry often enough to which I turn my back.

            this was never a commercial for anything, but capitalism & poetry

make it possible: José’s hands clapping back at colonialism in the bomba

            rhythm making a lover of the drum; my wrecked body carrying the fevers

of memory down from the mountains. how language spreads us over

            each other, our histories necking in the rain of it all. too many hearts to name,

& we are pulling up, anyway, to my door of seven years pretending to be home.

            our child is over now, the together-ride through a city that maybe ought

to sometimes sleep if only to remember what it is to really dream, to remember

            the grammar of closeness. our twelve minute love affair & its offspring

clinging to the window, heir to the ache of seasons. is that a marvel

            or a mess? can we tell the difference? cuidate, I close the door—parting,

after all, is the first sorrow we know. birth, a distance in the giving of light.

            the harshness of winter returns, a jealous lover at my cheek. but a music trails,

a heat, a season of side by side. how I’ve seen the party linger, every cumbia

            stomping the eye of Columbus. how we sing of home in the argot of the ruined,

the ruck of us, a cortege of seclusions. we leap toward each other, a whole continent of strangers

heidi andrea restrepo rhodes is a queer, Colombian/Latinx, poet, artist, scholar, and activist. Her poetry collection The Inheritance of Haunting (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019) was selected by Ada Limón for the 2018 Letras Latinas Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. The collection is a meditation on themes of inter-generational and collective inheritances of historical memory and post-colonial trauma, the responses they elicit, the forms of refusal, life, and love, that emerge in their wake. A 2019 CantoMundo Fellow, and 2018 VONA alum, her poetry has been published in Poetry, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Split This Rock’s Quarry, Nat.Brut, Feminist Studies, and Huizache, among other places. 

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs is a curated collaboration between Francisco Aragón at Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies, and Emma Trelles at the Best American Poetry blog.

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs: Grisel Y. Acosta

 

Ways of Seeing My Brothers
by Grisel Y. Acosta

1. You are precise artisans, designing aircrafts meant to soar above the altocumulus, or pumping air 
pulsating through twists of brass trumpet, pressing fingers down on valves to scream higher than a jet.

2. Smirking boys in a 70s photograph, unaware of the holes in your socks.

3. Fearless little men, walking into classrooms filled with children who will only think to ask,
“Are you a spic?”

4.        I do not see you in jail the night you totaled Mami’s car
           I do not see you stoned or geeked out, lonely and alienated in the college dorm
           I do not see you terrified when you see no options in the want ads
           I do not see you when you cry alone when your best friend fell in a rain of bullets
           I only see the miraculous feat of survival, how you managed the impossible:
           staying alive when the world told you every day you did not exist

5. I remember the day your daughter was born, dear brother, and you had to fill out a form, choose
Black or White. Your oblivious white wife saw the X by the word Black and asked you why and you said,
“Well I sure as hell ain’t white,” and all of a sudden you gave your own kind of birth.

6. I wore your clothes, walked like what we call a boy, talked knucklehead talk, became what you were.

7. The only time I met Tio Segundo en Cuba, who built his home with black market wood, his dirty
workman jeans the same as the ones I saw on you, brother, after a day of roofing, and my heart hurt
because I knew the two of you needed each other, drank yourselves into oblivion because you longed 
for each other, yet you would never meet.

8.                   I listened at your doors                            Devo              bang bang bang

                                                           Santana                      Black magic

                             sat for hours          

                                                                       wondered in AC/DC electric

            curiosity fizzling like

                                                                                   guitar feedback

                                                                                                                        waited for you

                             to open the passageway

9.

                                                are you safe, dear brothers?
                                                I cannot protect you from this
                                                obsession with your demise
                                                all I can offer is what I have seen
                                                remember, what I see is beauty

 

Dr. Grisel Y. Acosta is an associate professor at the City University of New York-Bronx Community College. Her first book of poetry, Things to Pack on the Way to Everywhere, is an Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize finalist and it is forthcoming from Get Fresh Books in 2021. Recent work can be found in The Baffler, Acentos Journal, Kweli Journal, Red Fez, Short Plays on Reproductive Freedom, and Celebrating Twenty Years of Black Girlhood: The Lauryn Hill Reader. She is a Geraldine Dodge Foundation Poet, a Macondo Fellow, and the editor of Latina Outsiders Remaking Latina Identity, an anthology that features over Latinx 30 contributors and subjects. Her work focuses on her Afro-Latinx and indigenous ancestry, queer identity, the punk and house music subcultures, her birthplace of Chicago, and the destruction of post-colonial neoliberalism.

For Summer: Poems by Latina/o/xs is a curated collaboration between Francisco Aragón at Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies, and Emma Trelles at the Best American Poetry blog.

Francisco’s Rubén: A Latinx Poet Gathers His Graces [by Michael Dowdy]

After Rubén : A Book Launch for Francisco Aragón with Fellow Macondo Readers takes place on Tuesday, March 3, from 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm at the Central Library, Latino Collection and Resource Center as part of Writer's Week at San Antonio Public Library, 600 Soledad Street, San Antonio, Texas.

The following is excerpted and adapted from the Foreword to After Rubén (Red Hen Press, 2020), by Francisco Aragón. 

Alan Pelaez Lopez has argued that the “X” in “Latinx” signifies an historical wound rather than a rhetorical trend. In Pelaez Lopez’s formulation, the wound of Latinidad emerges from four sites that correspond to the four sides of the X. The violences of settler colonialism, anti-blackness, and heteropatriarchy—the inability of language to fully articulate their impacts and define how vulnerable bodies navigate daily life in the Americas. At the crossroads of this volatile equis, I’d like to propose, Latinx poetry has the unique capacity to gather the worlds of the wounded: their tongues, triumphs, and hardships, their wounds and the words for drawing near them, perhaps even the words to begin building another world from within their aches and sorrows. Readers are fortunate to encounter in Francisco Aragón’s new collection of poems and prose After Rubén a passionate, wise, and sensitive guide to these worlds.

With joy, pluck, and a welcoming hand, Aragón’s lines and sentences take us to meet the people and their places. His mother, “head brimming with phrases” in English and amulets for escaping the sweatshop. His father, “portly, sugar / in his blood, a whiff of something // on his breath as he speaks of the Sacramento / River.” A sister, her voice “sturdy as the metal / table and chairs / in the patio.” Cities north and south, where numina float and settle, “as if a place—León, / Granada—could speak, / whistle, inhabit / a timbre.” A Nicaraguan woman testifying about the Contra War, whose words “gather and huddle / in my throat.” Unitedstatesian scoundrels, alas, such as Joe Arpaio, one of the empire’s cast of grotesques—“we’ve caught a glimpse / in the jowls of your sheriff: / bulldog who doubles as your heart.” And, approaching rapture, the poets who whisper and sing in Aragón’s ears and in the poems in his book.

Aragón has collected in After Rubén several lifetimes of a life in letters. From the “short / skinny boy” with a skateboard and “books in my backpack,” to the man in a hotel mirror who’s come to resemble his father, the constant is poetry and poets. Here, Aragón is a poet fierce and compassionate, wizened and empowered by his experiences as a gay Latinx man. Here is the tireless advocate for other poets, who share our air or breathe within poems we share with others. After Rubén meditates on family, both inherited and made, through filiation, through the words of living and dead. And our guide animates his dead, for, as he writes, “the dead are very patient.”

The Rubén of the title is, of course, the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío (1867-1916). Rubén—innovator of Latin American modernismo, not to be confused with Anglo-American modernism. Darío—recently “discovered” queer poet whose poems Aragón reinvents and reinvigorates. Rubén—beating heart of the collection, a body of poems and poets in communion across space and time. Consider the line just above. Borrowed from Jack Spicer’s book After Lorca, it serves as the evocative epigraph to After Rubén, where the dead are present, vigilant, and sensuously alive.

In this urgent book, and in our urgent times, after Rubén has many meanings: temporal (i.e., succeeding Darío); homage (praising Darío); inspiration (creating versions, riffs, and imitations inspired by Darío); trajectory (following in Darío’s footsteps); and pursuit (chasing Darío). These meanings converge in “My Rubén,” the gorgeous autobiographical essay that concludes the volume. Aragón’s beloved poet encompasses his mother’s—on demand she would recite sentimental lines to young Francisco. And his father’s—his favorite was Darío’s fable of St. Francis of Assisi, which Aragón rewrites as “The Man and the Wolf.” Of After Rubén’s many achievements, the most enduring may be Aragón’s intimate, generous, and deeply generative reintroduction of his Rubén Darío to readers in North America. Our charge is clear: to reread the mariposa modernista with the grace, care, and solidarity with which his compatriot Francisco Aragón has read him for us.

 

Francisco Aragón is the son of Nicaraguan immigrants. He is the author of Puerta del Sol and Glow of Our Sweat, as well as editor of The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry. His poems have appeared in twenty anthologies, most recently The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States (Tia Chucha Press) and Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color (Nightbook Books). Others include Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies (W.W. Norton), Deep Travel: American Poets Abroad (Ninebark Press), and Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice (University of Arizona Press). In 2017, he was a finalist for Split This Rock’s Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism. A native of San Francisco, CA, he directs Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies. Aragón divides his time between Washington, D.C. and South Bend, IN.  

Michael Dowdy is a poet, critic, editor, and essayist. He is the author of Broken Souths: Latina/o Poetic Responses to Neoliberalism and Globalization (University of Arizona Press) and the co-editor, with Claudia Rankine, of American Poets in the 21^st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement (Wesleyan University Press). As a poet, his works include a book, Urbilly (Main Street Rag), and a chapbook, The Coriolis Effect. He is an associate professor at the University of South Carolina where he teaches poetry and Latinx literature. He's been a faculty fellow at the National Endowment for the Humanities and at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center. Originally from Blacksburg, Virgina, he taught at Hunter College/Cuny for a decade before moving to South Carolina. 

For Summer: Florida Poets: Adrian Castro [by Emma Trelles]

The Sound Of One Immigrant Clapping
after Czeslaw Milosz

by Adrian Castro

Let's say he actually

did not

arrive on a boat--

that the relentless colonel

never found his subtle throat hidden

under the trance of the clave

or thunder hands that spoke

repíques of those crimes

Let's say he went to Nueva York

on the assumption

Mario Bauzá

Machito or

Tito (Rodriguez or Puente)

could make his legs & hips move

in a constellation of joy

Let's say he merely

tried

to hear the echo of his arms

flapping through a factory

like a red rag fastened to that fan

Let's say the cold

often froze his vowels

tan Caribeña

tan resvalosa y mermelada--

Could the immigrant even

mute the melody of his tongue--

They say it is silence

that makes music

But this will be like

drumming

on a distant tuft of cloud like

the colonel cutting the sound he never found

But it takes years of forgetting

for a stranger

to breathe the salt water

or glance at a pile of stones

& say

I arrived through this portal

This is now my home...


Adrian Castro is a poet, performer, and interdisciplinary artist. He was born in Miami from Caribbean heritage, which has provided fertile ground for the rhythmic Afro-Caribbean style in which he writes and performs. He is the author of Cantos to Blood & Honey, Wise Fish, and Handling Destiny, all from Coffee House Press, and has been published in several literary anthologies including Conjunctions, Paper Dance: 55 Latino Poets; Little Havana Blues; A Century of Cuban Writers in Florida; Step Into A World: A Global Anthology of New Black Literature; and Renaming Ecstasy: Latino Writings on the Sacred. He is the recipient of a USA Knight Foundation Fellowship, a Cintas Fellowship, a State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship, the NALAC Fund for the Arts Individual Fellowship, and the Eric Mathieu King award from the Academy of American Poets. Adrian Castro is also a board certified Doctor of Acupuncture & Oriental Medicine and herbalist. "The Sound of One Immigrant Clapping" first appeared in his collection Wise Fish: Tales in 6/8 Time. 

For Summer: Florida Poets: Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello [by Emma Trelles]

                                    in the shadow, federico carosio iii

Driving Down Old Cutler Road
              for Guillermo

by Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello

Banyans arch across the road,
all braided with orchids and light,
asphalt ragged with roots
so that we have to slow down and take
in more than we otherwise might.

This is your favorite road. You said this
once, stitching hours into the highways
between us, and I remember us drawn up
and down the eastern coast, each long-held
breath hemming in our frayed days.

Now, as I drive alone, these roots
seem to unspool into garlands of stars,
far-flung miles gathered back into the arms
of a man who, for all your driving, can have
a favorite road, and at the end of it, wait for me.


Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello is the author of the poetry collection Hour of the Ox (University of Pittsburgh, 2016), which won the 2015 AWP Donald Hall Prize and a 2016 Florida Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2017 Milt Kessler Award. She has received poetry fellowships from Kundiman, the Knight Foundation, and the American Literary Translators Association, among others. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Best Small Fictions, The New York Times, and more. She serves as the poetry editor for Hyphen Magazine and as a program coordinator for the Miami Book Fair. For more, visit www.marcicalabretta.com

For Summer: Florida Poets: Erica Dawson [by Emma Trelles]

carla, 2014, mickalene thomas

from When Rap Spoke Straight to God
by Erica Dawson

I’m covering my head, like Kool
G. Rap said, in this red zone. Dead.

This ain’t no motherland, though fek-uhnd
as fuck.
              Florida’s the only time
and place I’ve said, It’s a black thing,
you wouldn’t understand,       like I
will never understand the love-
bugs fucking ass to ass,         or man
standing his ground, shotgun in hand,
shooting at cans like they’re an unkindness
of ravens.

                    Seven years I have
mothered this nature into a woman.

The moon, her crevices, a tree
the sharpness of her tough skin split.



Erica Dawson is the author of three books of poetry: When Rap Spoke Straight to God (Tin House, 2018), winner of the 2018 Florida Book Awards Gold Medal for Poetry; The Small Blades Hurt (Measure Press, 2014), winner of the 2016 Poets’ Prize; and Big-Eyed Afraid (Waywiser Press, 2007), winner of the 2006 Anthony Hecht Prize. Her poems have appeared in Blackbird, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, and other journals. Her poems have appeared in several anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2008, 2012, and 2015; Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poets Now; and American Society: What Poets See. She is the director of University of Tampa’s Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing, and, at UT, an associate professor of English and Writing. 

 

For Summer: Florida Poets: Sean Sexton [by Emma Trelles]

stump garden, 9" x 12" etching on zinc, sean sexton

Nest Eggs
by Sean Sexton

Yesterday morning I prepared the roe of the mackerel queen
my son caught on a Saturday morning off-shore excursion.
I exhumed two swollen, pink, vein-bound bags from the silver
damsel, and sliced them into pieces to sauté.
I lament her demise, eggs never laid, fish lives
that never will be--eaten and relished with shame.

And the pea-hen that set five eggs in our dooryard
at the foot of St. Francis beneath the penumbra of a sapling
as we watched in awe of her sorry chosen nest, her
unfaltering devotion to the task. She'd stand
a moment, shift the eggs like a careful cook frying
chicken pieces, managing warmth, and some kind of order.

The curvature and needling devise of her beak revealed
its perfection for such, as did her shape, crouched
like morning fog upon a hollow. Day or night, rain or shine,
she stayed. In a downpour at dusk, we tried to help her,
swiped a shower curtain from the guest bath, to drape
in the branches of the tree, affixed with clothespins
and best of intention. We left a radio blaring through the night,

wakened to the crying, same as last month's hen that hatched
three fuzzy balls with legs she led half a week, feeding,
gathering them in when they strayed, until in a single
obliterating moment they were taken. For days she wandered
yelping, searching aimlessly. Now shells lie asunder
like smashed crockery. She's afoot and again, loose in the air--
the sound the world makes. 


Sean Sexton was born in Indian River County and grew up on his family's Treasure Hammock Ranch, eight miles west of Vero Beach, Florida.  He divides his time between taking care of a 600 acre cow-calf and seed stock cattle operation, painting, and writing.  He is married to artist Sharon Sexton; they have two grown children and live on their ranch in a house they built with their hands. He has kept journal-sketch books drawn from his life since 1973 and was awarded an Individual Artist’s Fellowship from the State of Florida in 2000-2001. He is the author of Waldo’s Mountain: A Brief History of a Small Elevation; (Waterview Press, 2001); Blood Writing, Poems (Anhinga Press, 2009), and The Empty Tomb (University of Alabama's Slash Pine Press, 2013). He was a presenter at the National Grazing Lands Coalition Conference in Orlando on the subject of Art and Agriculture. He has been a panelist at the Florida Literary Arts Coalition Conference in St. Augustine, FL, since 2012, and a regular performer at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, since 2011. He became inaugural Poet Laureate of Indian River County in 2016. "Nest Eggs" is from his most recent collection of poems, May Darkness Restore (Press 53, 2019).

 

For Summer: Florida Poets: Neil de la Flor [by Emma Trelles]

these are messages i'm sending to you, neil de la flor

The Vagabond

by Neil de la Flor

We bond over electronic music and make out. On the dance floor, his arms are dumbbells destined for the seabed. We pray for the abyss to relinquish the red lights of the world. Adora welcomes the world batting her eyelashes like a flamenco dancer bats her abanico. She is ridiculous in her beehive wig.

A boy and a girl wear leather dog collars as Lola spins the Cure, Depeche Mode, The Clash, New Order. We order two shots of tequila and photographic memories. Each shot is a declaration of love or something close to a crossbow. The arrow of time is a cosmic phenomenon divined in blue agave. The cosmos quarrels behind us in a black veil.

He reveals his history of histories beneath yellow street lights—a pair of binary stars fight for more space. Vampires move over. Rats get out. He bends dangerously in awe of his own angels.

We (don’t) share secrets.

The shadow on the left puts his left hand in the right pocket of the shadow on the right. We (or they) are nouns and verbs created in a foreign language. Each lie a point of light in the sky.

Neil de la Flor is a writer, educator, photographer, and executive director of Reading Queer, a Knight Foundation funded organization dedicated to promoting queer literary culture in South Florida. He is the author of Almost Dorothy (Marsh Hawk Press, 2010), winner of the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize and An Elephant’s Memory of Blizzards (Marsh Hawk Press). He also co-authored four collaborative books of poetry, including Sinead O’Connor and her Coat of a Thousand Bluebirds (Firewheel Editions, 2011), co-authored with Maureen Seaton and winner of the Sentence Book Award; Facial Geometry (NeoPepper Press, 2006), co-authored with Maureen Seaton and Kristine Snodgrass; and Two Thieves and a Liar (Jackleg Press, 2012), also co-authored with Maureen Seaton and Kristine Snodgrass. He graduated with an MFA from the University of Miami, where he was a Michener Fellow, and can be reached at neildelaflor.com

For Summer: Florida Poets: Caridad Moro-Gronlier [by Emma Trelles]

the dream of flight, 2019, collage with japanese paper & watercolor on canvas, maria berrio

Entry 

by Caridad Moro-Gronlier

 

Tortillera, n.

Pronounciation: Spanish /tor-ti-lle-ra/, Spain, Latin, Central and South America, U.S.
Forms:Torti, Torta, Tort, Tortilla
Etymology: < Latin tortus (twisted), <Spanish torta, <Germanque<English queer. Compare French tortille
Origin:<From term torticera (tortious), derived from Latin tortus, with the meaning of crooked, twisted, etc. torticera, a highbrow word, by a process of popular etymology pronounced wrongly as tortillera by their phonetic similarity as in "she is tortillera" instead of "she is torticera" by an error in pronunciation.
Synonyms:amaricada, arepera, bollera, bollo, buchona, cachapera, cambuja, camionera, come coños, desviada, ententida, fricatriz, hombruna, invertida, juega tenis, kiki, lechuga, lela, lencha, lesbiana, machorra, marimacha(o), obvia, sáfica, sopaipilla, tijeras, tribada, trola, troquera, virago, webiá, zapatona

1.
a. Homosexual woman; lesbian.
I outed myself as a tortillera at Noche Buena dinner last Christmas and I was roasted along with the lechón.

b.Transatlantic traveler term known to connect homosexuality with the beginning of homophobia; refutes all sexual and onomatopoeic explanations (i.e. the supposed equivalency between the clapping sound made from kneading corn pancakes to the sound made during lesbian sex) as seen through the consideration of homosexual behavior as something twisted, deviant, first referenced in 1830 in the Spanish-French dictionary by M. Nuñez de Taboada, published in Madrid, in which the French word tribade is translated as tortillera and defined as "a woman who abuses another”.
My mother did not allow me to play softball in high school because the coach was a tortillera and she didn’t want me to end up a tortillera, too.

c. Derogatory slang that denotes deviant, twisted behavior, the lowest form of female debasement, term known to induce emotional distress such as shame and self-loathing, as well as physical symptoms including, but not limited to anorexia, bulimia, cutting, dermatitis, depression, enuresis, flushing, gastritis, heart palpitations, hyperhidrosis, insomnia, irritable bowel syndrome, kyphosis, lethargy, malaise, mania, nausea, nightmares, OCD, panic attack, paranoia, rash, rosacea, scarring, sleepwalking, stuttering, tachycardia, tongue biting, teeth gnashing, thinning hair, ulcers, vomiting, xerostomia.
Better my daughter be dead than a disgusting tortillera. 

2. Female producer and seller of maize pancakes.
According to Adolfo Sanchez Vazquez, upon the arrival of Spaniards exiled to Mexico due to the Civil War, some were greeted by a sign that read "El sindicato de Tortilleras les da la bienvenida!", which caused someone to quip, “This is a very cosmopolitan country if even tortilleras have a union!”

 

 

Caridad Moro-Gronlier is the award-winning author of Visionware, published by Finishing Line Press as part of its New Women's Voices Series. She is the recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant and a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship in poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in  Pintura:Palabra, An Anthology of Ekphrastic Writing; Rhino Reading Queer: Poetry In a Time of Chaos; Bridges To/From Cuba; The Antioch Review; The Tishman Review;The Cossack Review; Moon City Review; The Damfino Review;The Collapsar; The Notre Dame Review; The South Florida Poetry Journal; The Comstock Review; This Assignment Is So Gay: LGBTIQ Poets on the Art of Teaching; The Lavender Review; and others. She is an English professor at Miami Dade College and the Editor-In-Chief of The Orange Island Review. She resides in Miami, Florida, with her wife and son. "Entry" first appeared in Rhino Poetry.

For Summer: Florida Poets: Brian Turner [by Emma Trelles]

Aedes Aegypti

by Brian Turner

With the audio on mute, the television
flickers over the bodies of lovers
tangled in dream, carbon dioxide
pluming from their mouths
the way factory smoke billows
from the industrial park outside of town.

Mosquitoes circle in a holding pattern above.
As the female’s wings beat 400 times
per second, the male’s at 600 hertz,
their wingtips trace the smallest figure-8s
into the invisible, a gesture toward the infinite.

Such brief lives they have. One month,
maybe, their coupling a conversation
at 1200 hertz, the high pitch of their union
an A above concert C—

                                       Beethoven’s last note,
perhaps, the note he chose not to take
by feather from the well of ink
the way a mosquito might dip a stylet
in blood.

               He let the note play itself out.
To recognize the cry of the bat
with its hunger returning. Blue notes
smoldered out from the throats of lovers.
That no matter how certain
the crushing weight of the indomitable,
even the smallest of flyers
raise their wings in music.

Brian Turner is a writer and musician; author of a memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country, two poetry collections (Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise), and a debut album with The Interplanetary Acoustic Team. He edited The Kiss anthology and curated the series on Guernica. He’s received a Guggenheim, a USA Fellowship, an NEA, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize, and a Lannan Foundation Fellowship. He’s published in The New York Times (online), National Geographic, Harper’s Magazine, and more. He directs the MFA at Sierra Nevada College.